The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (474 page)

Stalin certainly held Poland to be a matter of interest, but for reasons different from—and at odds with—Churchill’s. Churchill later wrote that Poland was discussed at seven of the eight plenary sessions. Poland indeed was mentioned often, but not until the third session did the Big Three get down to brass tacks on Poland, because, as Averell Harriman
later wrote, “the fate of Poland… had been largely decided before Roosevelt and Churchill took up the subject with Stalin at Yalta. Events were in the saddle.” The dispute, at its core, came down to this: Was Poland (its borders and future government) a clean slate to be filled in (Churchill and Roosevelt), or was the Communist Lublin government (in place in Warsaw) to form the basis for the evolution of Polish self-government (Stalin)? Churchill reminded Stalin that Britain had gone to war for Poland on a point of honor. Stalin, as he had for three years, reminded Churchill that Poland was not simply a matter of honor for the Soviet Union, but a question of both honor and security—honor because the Russians had been in regular conflict with the Poles for centuries, and security because Poland occupied that swath of Eastern Europe that emptied onto the Russian homeland. He also pointed out to Churchill that he thought it ironic that Churchill wanted to dictate terms to Poland, while he, Stalin, who was called a dictator, simply wanted the Poles (guided by his Lublin puppets) to chart their own course. It was a mess that defied solution.
¹¹¹

And although Roosevelt composed a handwritten letter to Stalin during the conference that made clear his concerns about Poland, the president displayed an insouciance that regularly took the form of jokes that served only to undercut the importance of the issue. Eager to end one discussion that was going nowhere, Roosevelt offered, “Poland has been a source of trouble for over five hundred years.” Toward the end of another meeting, Roosevelt, while perusing a map of Eastern Europe, asked Molotov how long ago certain areas belonged to Poland. When Molotov replied, “a very long time ago,” Roosevelt said, “This might lead the English to ask for a return of the United States to Great Britain.” On that note, Roosevelt, exhausted, adjourned the meeting. Of Roosevelt’s behavior Eden later wrote, “I do not believe that the president’s declining health altered his judgment, though his handling of the conference was less sure than it might have been.”
¹¹²

During the plenary sessions of February 9 and 10, the Big Three finally reached an agreement on Poland, or, more accurately, an interim agreement. Despite his insistence that nothing be dictated to the Poles, Stalin prevailed. The Lublin Poles would be recognized as the Polish provisional government; in turn the Lublin government would pledge to hold elections as soon as possible (Stalin thought within a month), but the validity of the elections was to be guaranteed not by representatives of the three Allies on the spot, but rather by the Big Three foreign ministers, who would meet in Moscow. This barely satisfied Churchill’s insistence that Poland be “mistress in her own house and captain of her soul.” He could return to London and truthfully tell the House that he and Roosevelt had not thrown over the London Poles, had not accepted in toto the Lublin government, but had
agreed to a mechanism (free elections) for all Polish factions to take their cases to their countrymen. Yet no Polish leaders of any stripe had been invited to Yalta to air their opinions on the matter. Finally, the Big Three settled the matter of Polish borders, but again, as an interim recommendation to be taken under consideration at the peace conference. The borders east and west would take the general shape discussed a year earlier at Tehran—half of East Prussia to the Poles, half to Russia; the Curzon Line would define the eastern border, and Upper Silesia would go to the Poles, but Lvov to Russia. The new border would shift to the Neisse River in the west, but, as at Tehran, no final decision was made on which branch of the Neisse, the Eastern or Western. In effect, the final decision on Polish borders, like many of the issues discussed at Yalta, had been taken “under consideration.” Churchill later wrote, “It was the best I could get.”
¹¹³

“For further consideration” became the order of the day. Stalin insisted that German reparations amount to $20 billion and that half go to Russia. Churchill objected. Twenty billion was far more than Germany could pay; it was the oppressive peace of Versailles redux. He insisted that an actual figure not be included in any declaration; Stalin prevailed, though Roosevelt saw the resolution as agreeing to disagree, the matter to be settled later. Likewise, the matter of German “dismemberment” was sidestepped by all agreeing that the first step in that direction must take the form of Allied zones of occupation. There would be four: France was in. On the makeup of the United Nations, the Russians—to Roosevelt’s delight—dropped their demand for separate membership for their sixteen republics and said they’d settle for just two. Roosevelt agreed that the offer “deserved sympathetic consideration.” Molotov had shot for the stars and was rewarded with the moon. Yet this agreement, too, was only “in principle,” to be considered and possibly codified at the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco, in April (Belarus and Ukraine were admitted in October). That was Roosevelt’s style—move things along but don’t press.

On the Pacific front, Roosevelt sought concession from Stalin for airbases on the Asian mainland; Stalin sought the return to Russia of Sakhalin and other territories grabbed by Tokyo in 1905. Manchuria would be a Russian “sphere” (Roosevelt’s quest to quell spheres of influence did not extend to Russia). Asia was an area of discussion that Churchill claimed he had no interest in. “To us,” he later wrote, “the problem [Pacific deals and agreements] was remote and secondary.” Perhaps, but Stalin and Roosevelt had reached agreement on a number of Asian matters in secret and without consulting the British or Chiang. “This [agreement],” Eden wrote, “was, in my judgment, a discreditable by-product of the conference.” It also, Eden wrote, undermined the argument of those who attributed Roosevelt’s decisions at Yalta to his illness. During a conference that was “strenuous even
for a man of Churchill’s energy,” Roosevelt found time and energy to conduct a parallel conference with Stalin.
¹¹⁴

It was left to Roosevelt to utter perhaps the most important statement—or at least the statement most full of portent—of the conference. In what Churchill called a “momentous declaration,” Roosevelt volunteered during the first plenary session that he did not think American troops would stay on in Europe much longer than two years after Germany’s defeat. He had told Harriman much the same two years earlier, and had told Churchill several times in 1944. The statement was meant to diminish Stalin’s wariness of the West ganging up on him. It reconfirmed for Churchill his belief in the need for a strong France. To Stalin it also sent a clear message of indecision, if not weakness. It told Stalin that agreements made at Yalta depended on trust for their implementation but might be abrogated through force. To Eden it was another occasion when Roosevelt “mistakenly as I believe, moved out of step with us, influenced by his conviction that he could get better results with Stalin direct than could the three countries negotiating together. This was an illusion.”
¹¹⁵

The illusion was conjured under circumstances that would try the stamina of a young man, let alone three old men. Churchill’s day began at midnight, when he took to his bed to read dispatches and newspapers until the early hours. He rose and bathed shortly before noon, and took what he referred to as “brunch,” appropriating the American name for the midday meal. Plenary sessions began around 4:30 each afternoon and ran until about nine at night. Each of the Big Three hosted a feast during the conference, Churchill’s turn coming on February 10. These liquid affairs were defined by lengthy toasts and “buckets of champagne,” as described by Cadogan. “I think we’re making some progress,” Cadogan told his diary, “but this place is still rather a madhouse.” During these affairs, myriad jolly men leapt to their feet to offer, as they thought, toasts of warmth and wisdom. Churchill raised one such to the Soviet army: “The men who have broken the back of the German war machine.” They toasted political parties, the King of England, the common man, leaders, women, the alliance, the future. During Stalin’s dinner, given at the Yusupov Palace, Cadogan estimated that fifty toasts had been raised; Edward Stettinius pegged the toasts at forty-five and the courses at twenty. Celebrants fell asleep; some slipped beneath the table. Thus, the future of the world was agreed upon. “I have never known the Russians to be so easy and accommodating,” Cadogan wrote in a letter to his wife. “In particular, Joe has been very good.” He added, “The president in particular is very wooly and wobbly.” The president, Churchill confided to his doctor, “is behaving very badly.
He won’t take any interest in what we’re trying to do.” But what were they trying to do? After eight days they had agreed to disagree, agreed to postpone final decisions, and, as Churchill put it, agreed “to consult about a consultation.”
¹¹⁶

On February 11, the Big Three signed their Declaration on Liberated Europe—the Yalta Declaration, as elastic a document as produced during the war. In essence it was a reprise of the Atlantic Charter, that is, not a law but a loose confederation of words upholding the “right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live” and pledging the “restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those people who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations.” Two weeks later, Churchill explained it all to the House. First, he placed blame for the need to even conduct such negotiations squarely at the feet of the London Poles:

Then, after posing rhetorical questions on the viability of the Yalta Declaration—will it work, will elections be “free and unfettered”—he gave his answer:

Churchill left Yalta early on the evening of February 11. The plan called for him to stay one more night, but upon driving into the grounds of the Vorontsov Palace, he turned to Sarah and said: “Why do we stay here? Why don’t we go tonight—I see no reason to stay a minute longer—we’re off.” He strutted into the private office and announced, “I don’t know about you—but I’m off. I leave in fifty minutes.” And he did, in ninety minutes, to be exact. The staff packed up everything, including laundry that was still damp, and were off within two hours. Churchill motored
forty miles to Sevastopol, where the Cunard liner
Franconia
rode at anchor, his home for the next three nights. Meanwhile, Stalin, Sarah wrote, “like some genie, just disappeared.” Roosevelt flew off to Cairo on the morning of the twelfth. On the fourteenth, Churchill boarded his Skymaster at Laki for a flight to Athens, where he checked in on Archbishop Damaskinos, the new regent, and where, although the crowds cheered the old Englishman, the underlying political infections that Churchill had treated seven weeks earlier still festered. From Athens, deeply anxious now about the future, Churchill flew on to Cairo, to say his farewells to Franklin Roosevelt, who was taking his rest on the USS
Quincy
after conducting a parley with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. The president, Churchill later wrote, seemed “placid and frail. I felt that he had a slender contact with life.” They never met again.
¹¹⁸

Within a few weeks, throughout the European theater, the agreements taken at Yalta strained under their structural flaws and Roosevelt’s “momentous statement” that American troops would remain in Europe for only two years after the war. This was an opening Stalin soon seized, and exploited. Churchill and Britain now lacked the political and military means to change the course of events in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria—as well as in Yugoslavia, where Tito was prepared to play the Soviets and Anglo-Americans off against each other. But not in Greece, where Stalin, keeping his word, had not interfered. In Greece, Jock Colville later wrote, Churchill’s show of force—to guarantee free elections, not override them, as was Stalin’s wont—brought Greeks “twenty or so years of… freedom and democracy.” Still, a sense of failure had gripped Churchill for the entire journey. By early spring, Stalin’s abjuration of the decisions taken at Yalta would guarantee the veracity of Churchill’s intuition. One vital matter was not even addressed by the Big Three in Yalta: just exactly where in Germany would the Allied armies finally stop?
¹¹⁹